1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to the field of computer systems and, more specifically, to systems and methods for applying a selected editing style to selected paragraphs of a computer-readable document.
2. Description of the Related Art
The era of modern communications has produced a need to create and maintain large computer-readable text documents (e.g. Microsoft Word documents of 200 pages and more). One problem with such documents is that they may become corrupted, where part of the data contained in the document is lost and cannot be recovered.
One way to reduce the chance of large documents becoming corrupted is to use styles when creating a document with some word processing tool, such as e.g. Heading 1, Heading 2, Default, Body Text, etc. Using styles also simplifies the repair of a corrupted document.
Currently, there are several different approaches for creating styles in a computer-readable document. One approach is to manually choose a style among the plurality of styles available for the document. However, many users find this approach boring and tedious. Another approach is to use shortcut keys where each shortcut key corresponds to a particular style. However, there is only a limited number of shortcut keys, which limits the number of styles that may be used in this manner. In addition, remembering which shortcut key corresponds to which style may be difficult. Another approach is to use a tool bar that displays to the user the available styles. However, to have a large collection of styles at the user's disposal, a large tool bar is needed, taking up much space on the display. Yet another approach is to use a conventional menu bar. However, using the menu bar may be quite time-consuming because often times several clicks of a computer mouse are required to get to the desired style.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a system and a method for applying styles that overcomes one or more problems described above.